ECOLOGY & EVOLUTION IN FRAGMENTED PRAIRIE HABITAT

Echinacea project volunteers

Our volunteers are indispensable to the success of the Echinacea project. Each year they collectively contribute hundreds of hours of service and innovative ideas to enhance the speed, accuracy, and efficiency of data collection. Many of them also bring the aroma of freshly popped popcorn when returning from their well-deserved breaks.

Our volunteers help processing and analyzing of Echinacea heads. Each year we bring an overwhelming number of Echinacea heads back to the CBG from our field sites and experimental plots in Minnesota (this year there were around 1200 heads). These heads need to have their achenes removed, which is often a prickly process - the name Echinacea is loosely translated as, 'thing of spiny-ness.' Later the achenes from each head are placed in a pyrex dish and scanned to create a digital image. Then our indefatigable volunteers count the numbers of achenes in each image; between all the heads we bring back, the total number of achenes each years ranges in the hundreds of thousands. Finally, a subset of achenes from some of the heads will be weighed to predict whether they contain a seed or not.

Volunteers also help out with germination experiments and assist with all the many other things we do in the greenhouse and lab.

We're starting to record the number of hours worked by volunteers for the Echinacea project: they accumulated almost 300 hours between the beginning of January 2008 and the end of March 2008!

Here's a photo from our volunteer appreciation luncheon on 5 June 2008. We shared some great food, told fun stories, and heard about accomplishments from the past year. Front row (L to R): Char, Jennifer, Marita, and Pat. Back row: Anne, Stuart, Art, Christine, Bob, Bill, Lani, Denise, and Julie.